Just a follow up to my post earlier this week about the new Bob Dylan album, around which a certain excitement seems to be accumulating. As I mentioned, the album features ten new Dylan songs that I can now give titles to, including “Roll On John”, the album’s closing track, a wistful tribute to John Lennon that quotes lines from several Beatles songs, including “Come Together” and “A Day In The Life”.
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Don’t spread it about, but, yes, I’ve heard the new Dylan album. And four or five tracks in, what I was thinking was: how much better is this thing going to get?
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There was exciting news this morning about the release on September 10 of a new Bob Dylan album, which if you haven’t seen the official announcement is called Tempest. There was much talk of the record a few weeks ago, backstage at the Hop Farm Festival, where one or two people rather teasingly inferred they had heard it, or knew someone who had.
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When Bob Dylan played Hop Farm in 2010, it was the hottest weekend of the year and there seemed to be more people at the festival than the site could hold. There were queues for everything and queues to join those queues were not uncommon. By early afternoon, you could barely move for the people already there and the constant stream of new arrivals who added to an already considerable mass.
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One of the records I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of these last couple of weeks is The Graceless Age, the new album by John Murry, who Uncut regulars may remember from World Without End, a sensationally bleak 2006 collection of contemporary murder ballads he made with the Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank. The Graceless Age, like World Without End, produced by Tim Mooney, the former American Music Club drummer, at Closer Recording, the studio Tim owned in San Francisco, at 1441 Howard Street. The more I played it, the more The Graceless Age sounded like one of the best things Mooney had been involved in, as either producer or musician, a dark and festering masterpiece.
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Some news first of all on our iPad app version of ‘Bruce Springsteen: The Ultimate Music Guide’, which is finally on sale.
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Mick Ronson once fell asleep on me during an interview, the glam rock guitar god nodding off towards the end of what had become quite an emotional late night outburst on his part about how he had been betrayed by David Bowie after thanklessly contributing so much to Bowie’s success.
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Things aren’t due to kick off for a couple of hours at the Pavilion Theatre where throughout this year’s Great Escape Festival Uncut is hosting a splendid line-up. So early Thursday evening I’m at the Dome, where Australian psyche rockers POND are making enough noise to wake the long-time dead.
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Jerry Scheff is surely not an unfamiliar name to readers of Uncut. I’d wager a horse most of you have more than one album in your collection that feature him on bass. Among the highlights of a lengthy and illustrious CV, he can count gigs with Elvis Presley, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Todd Rundgren, Richard Thompson, Bette Midler, Crowded House, Johnny Cash, T-Bone Burnett, Roy Orbison, Suzanne Vegas and Jimmie Dale Gilmour.
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Like many music fans of a certain age, John Peel turned me on to a lot of music I may otherwise only have stumbled upon much later, if at all. I remember, for instance, in July 1969, listening to his Top Gear show one weekend and hearing something that lit me up like a burning house. It didn’t sound like much else he played that afternoon and as I recall he was afterwards not altogether enthusiastic about it, as if he as wondering why, beyond the fact that it was new and wouldn’t have yet been widely heard, he’d even bothered playing it.
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